Some Thoughts on Mental Organization, the Word, and the

Leap of Faith from Clinic to Culture 1

By Cathie Bird, MA, PsyP

Ooma-mow-mow, papa-ooma-mow-mow
Papa-ooma-mow-mow, ooma-mow-mow
Well don't you know about the bird?
Well, everybody knows that the bird is the word!
A-well-a bird, bird, b-bird's the word…

--lyrics from "Surfin' Bird" by the Trashmen

My seeking circuits went into overdrive last spring semester with our class on
psychoanalytic ethics and social change--so much so that I spent the
summer researching some ideas that really inspired me to the hunt. I
tracked them individually for a while, but now their trails have merged.
Before they scatter off into the woods of chaos to further evolve and
integrate, I'd like to share some thoughts about organization of the group or
collective Self, and how we might use words to change the world beyond the
clinic.

The space between changing the world one consciousness at a time and
influencing social change on a larger scale has always seemed like a huge
leap. In my psychoanalytic training and practice, I've often thought about the
Federation of Planets' Prime Directive. Even if one does not claim to be a
Trekkie, many in our culture would recognize the key words of every Star
Trek episode's opening moments: space, the final frontier and the five year
mission to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and civilizations,
to boldly go, and so on. Many would also recall the centrality of the Prime
Directive as an organizing principle, of sorts, that protects growth and
development of alien worlds from interference by the intergalactic explorers
who encounter them.

My favorite Star Trek episodes are ones in which one or another of the
Enterprise generations tangles with the meaning of action in terms of
noninterference. Now we're talking ethics! As I see it, this is where Jacques
Lacan meets Jean-Luc Picard: analyst's desire meets Prime Directive.
Practically speaking, analysts don't dive in to save suffering psyches and ET's
don't swoop down to save suffering planets. But those who've gone on where
no one had gone before did leave us with ideals and tactical guidelines for

1
Originally published in: Colorado Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies Newsletter, No. 18, Winter
2007 http://ccmps.net/NEWSL.18.pdf

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encountering a wide variety of alien or alienated life forms, be they single
souls or a collective Self organized in fields, institutions, groups, nations or
entire civilizations. Some core assumptions--for both analysts and starship
captains--are implicit: there is truth to be had, though its revelation may be
resisted or delayed, and we're free to further the search for truth as long as
the subjects are willing and we don't meddle in harmful ways. Should
personal or planetary selves be liberated from suffering along the way--and
we know some will be--well, so much the better.

Where do we start and what are the pitfalls? For 30 years, even in the chaos
of geographical relocations, I've kept a special journal close by. Inside is a
paper titled Drive in Living Matter to Perfect Itself by the Hungarian-
American biochemist Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, i and every 5 years or so I'm
inspired to re-read it. Szent-Gyorgyi researched energy transformations in
cells and eventually became interested in the application of quantum physics
to the study of biological processes. In this paper he discusses the tendency
of organized forms to fall apart, spiraling into lower levels of organization
(entropy), and proposes an opposite force, a negative entropy or syntropy,
that causes things--especially living things-- to reach "higher and higher
levels of organization, order and dynamic harmony" (p.12).

In his lifelong "hunt for the secret of life" (p.14) Szent-Gyorgyi came to this
conclusion by studying organisms with increasingly fewer levels of
organization. Early in his career he zeroed in on energy transformations
because he understood them as processes most closely linked to life. He first
"went to the source of vital energies" (p.14) to study molecular levels of
biological oxidation. He got a Nobel Prize for this work but still he felt he was
no closer to understanding life, so he turned to the study of muscles, "the
seat of the most violent and massive energy transformations" (p.15). He
worked for twenty more years on muscle and still felt he'd learned nothing:

The more I knew, the less I understood; and I was afraid to finish my
life with knowing everything and understanding nothing. Evidently
something very basic was missing. I thought that in order to
understand I had to go one level lower, to electrons, and--with graying
hair--I began to muddle in quantum mechanics. So I finished up with
electrons. But electrons were just electrons and have no life at all.
Evidently on the way I lost life; it had run out between my fingers.
(p.15)

In later years, Szent-Gyorgyi returned to study life at the cellular level of

organization because he saw it as a cornerstone of living systems and, in his
time, a dimension that had been under-explored. He says he never regretted
his "wild goose chase" (p.15) because it made him wiser to the idea that all
levels of organization are equally important if we want to understand the

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state of being called life. But in this hunt we must remain cautious lest we
"fall victim to the simple idea that any level of organization can best be
understood by pulling it to pieces, by a study of its components" (p.15).

Do we have such temptations in our time? The arrival of neuroscience,

evolutionary and developmental sciences on the psychoanalytic scene has
livened things up a bit. Just as Szent-Gyorgyi played with edges of physical
and biological sciences, analysts have new edges between biological science
and the psyche to explore. We have additional levels of organization on
which we can focus--neurotransmitters, neural networks, affective systems
or neural correlates of consciousness itself--if we think that study will yield
the greatest understanding of mental and emotional suffering. Can we
welcome all disciplines to the psychoanalytic hunt yet stay alert to the evils
of reification, deification, oversimplification or reduction? I think so, if we can
trust our psychoanalytic process and keep our noses to the trail.

On a very hot evening in Knoxville this summer the trail led me to a

serendipitous discussion, moderated by Alan Sugarman, on the importance of
mental organization in relation to therapeutic action in psychoanalysis. In his
work as a child analyst, Sugarman ii has become interested in what he sees as
a "fundamental false dichotomy about the nature of insight" (p.1) that
privileges verbal interpretations of unconscious content and fails to account
for the formal organization of the analysand's mind. He proposes that
insightfulness, which he sees as synonymous to concepts of mentalization
and theory of mind, is a more important goal of psychoanalysis. People need
to be aware that they have an internal world that is built on experiences, and
fantasies about these experiences, as they grow and develop. It is our inner
workings that contribute to feelings, sense of self, and ability to relate to
people and the world.

What kind of world do we as a human group create if we don't develop such

awareness? While most discussions of mentalization or insightfulness focus
on lives of individuals, some of the words used by Sugarman, Fonagy and
others to describe consequences of its lack suggest, to me, possible
translation to a concept of group Self. Development of affect regulation,
narcissistic regulation, and a self that includes both self-representational
structures and a sense of self-agency are all implicated in the process that
Fonagy iii speaks of as mentalization. Because mentalization is a core aspect
of human social functioning, says Fonagy, we can infer great evolutionary
value in developing structures through which we can interpret interpersonal
actions. When something goes wrong at these levels of mental organization,
a person may be unable to process or interpret information about their
mental states, or those of others, in a way that allows them to function
effectively the social world.

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What happens to the word in all of this? If our subjective world is not
organized, language--symbolic communication--can't function adequately. If
we can't give symbolic meaning to our internal states, it's hard to
communicate them or to interpret them in other people. iv And if something
is messed up with words, it can present a real challenge for talk therapies.
This is the territory that drew Sugarman's interest in his analysis of children,
though in his presentation he talked about lack of insightfulness in adult
patients as well. As our discussion unfolded that evening, I had many
associations to patients I've worked with, and to the kinds of feelings or
images that people with such difficulties induce. But a question also arose as
to whether there might be a kind of group or collective Self insightfulness (or
lack of it!) that operates on a larger scale--say in a nation's domestic or
international relations.

Psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan v addresses the leap from clinical practice to

international relations, building a working model for Track II (a.k.a. unofficial
or citizen) diplomacy that begins with an understanding of the individual
mind. To locate the origins of our concepts of political and social enemies,
Volkan takes us back to the infant's developing sense of self, especially those
experiences and processes that structure good and bad self- and object-
representations. By the time we reach adulthood, we have some sense of
who we are, what kinds of people we like or don't like to hang out with; we
have integrated personal and cultural values that include ideas about who's
safe to be with and who isn't. Volkan is especially interested in looking at
those places in human development at which an individual's concept of
enemy begins to merge with that of the larger group in which she or he lives,
be it family, ethnic group, religion or nation. It is this intersection that brings
us closest to understanding how groups come to name a shared enemy. In
later books, Volkan develops other concepts explored briefly in this volume
including ethnic terrorism, vi large group leader and follower relations, vii and,
most recently, the childhood origins of large group ethnic, national, religious
and ideological identity and it's role in conflict. viii

At this point in a more comprehensive and contemplative study of Volkan's

works, I would say that his discussions of group regression in times of crisis
most closely meshes with what inspired me to take the leap from Sugarman's
insightfulness to behavior of the group Self. In a 2001 issue of Mind and
Human Interaction, Volkan writes about regression as a useful concept for
exploring the causes and consequences of the attacks on 9/11. ix When a
group suffers humiliation or loss of life or property at the hands of another
group, regression signals an attempt by the group and its leader to protect or
repair shared large-group identity and to separate it from that of the enemy.
There are a number of well-documented signs of group regression, many of
which were visible in the U.S group following 9/11. Presidential approval
ratings climbed as people rallied behind Bush. In a collapse of time,

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memories of past humiliations at Pearl Harbor rose quickly to the group's
mental surface. Radical Christian fundamentalists declared the attacks as
punishment by God for the sins of feminists, homosexuals and civil
libertarians. In the five years since 9/11 we have many more examples of
polarization, desire for group purification, and collective mania, depression or
paranoia that is heightened by use of more primitive projective and
introjective processes.

Just as Volkan acknowledges that all of us normally experience movement

between progressive and regressive states, Sugarman notes that we can
track an "ebb and flow of symbolizing versus desymbolizing" (p.7) in our
analytic work. This is so because earlier modes of the developmental
continuum are not lost but become subordinated and integrated in more
advanced modes. Sugarman understands drive regression or ego weakness
as more traditional ways of looking at individual psychopathology, so I'm
wondering what he would think about the U.S. group's behavior as a possible
synthesis of the sum of failures to develop, and loss of, the symbolic level of
organization in a group Self? At any rate, I think we've seen that, post-9/11
(if not before), the US group has become even more disconnected from its
inner world and continues to see its own worst fears and most objectionable
features alive and well out there, in them. What use of the word might break
the spell?

The psychogenic theory of history formulated by Lloyd DeMause x offers

another way to study the organization of group Self. DeMause identifies the
root of human violence and suffering in the hidden holocaust of childhood
trauma. In light of my focus on organization in this paper, I'm especially
interested in DeMause's notion that society as we see and experience it is a
result of how our brains are structured. Shared restaging of dissociated
memories of trauma--from child abuse to the trauma of fetal experience and
birth itself--creates psychic content that is organized by early emotional
experiences, thus psychic structure is "passed from generation to generation
through the narrow funnel of childhood" (p.97). As we grow up, dissociative
elements of our psyches become organized in shared "persecutory scenarios"
which DeMause calls social alters. In social contexts we come to prefer living
in these social alter states, which collude with one another to create a social
trance. Social alters share some interesting characteristics. According to
DeMause, they are based in neural networks that are separate from those of
the private self and contain images, feelings and defensive fantasies
connected with abuse and neglect; they are organized as dynamic structures
that have different agendas, values and defenses than those of the core self,
and function to defend against memories of suffering in childhood; their work
is to reproduce the main actors from childhood (victims, persecutors,
protectors) in society; they are known to the main personality but are split
off through denial, disavowal and other defenses that maintain the social

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trance; and, social alters restage early traumas in the historical group-
fantasies that create society's political, social and religious institutions.

DeMause's accounts of social alters and trances evoke many associations to

my subjective experience of moving in and out of personal and social spaces,
including the current political scene of the United States. Are these
phenomena possibly the group Self correlates of failed mentalization as
described by Fonagy, Sugarman and others? When we in the analyst group
doubt that our words can penetrate the fog of mental organization and social
trance to influence social change, when we experience a loss of our sense of
agency as analysts, what exactly is it that we're tripping over?

We have much evidence that the people we want to reach already have faith
in the power of words. The Internet and blogosphere, the proliferation of cell
phones, iPods and Blackberries in our culture (and others!) attest to this. If
you follow political culture on the Internet you may have witnessed the
exploding popularity of George Lakoff, a professor of cognitive linguistics who
now coaches democrats, progressives and environmental activists in the
science of using language to change the frame of political debates. Lakoff's
work has even reached grassroots social justice groups here in the
Appalachians.

Lakoff xi suggests that we need to update our theories of mind, discarding the
17th century model that ignores findings of cognitive science that "reason is
mostly unconscious" and "rationality requires emotion" (p.1). One of the
most important concepts for politics, says Lakoff, is that frames are mental
structures, and can be associated with words (surface frames) or with deep
frames that structure higher-level organizations of knowledge. Thus, "the
surface frames only stick easily when they fit into higher structures, such as
the strict father/nurturant parent worldviews" (p.4) that tend to differentiate
people who identify themselves as conservatives or liberals.

In this sense, Lakoff is inviting people to investigate their own minds and the
minds of others, and to speculate on the functioning of our inner worlds in
relation to our group Self. I'm thinking that if we want more people to enjoy
the benefits of psychoanalysis and its theoretical insights, we need to figure
out a way to talk about it that catches the surface of deep mental structures
and gets us beyond the barriers of more primitively organized psyches. And
we need to do this in arenas of popular culture, politics and religion where
our social alters do their work.

So, is anybody out there still singing, "papa-ooma-mow-mow"? When Surfin'

Bird was popular, I was in my classical music phase. I caught the "papa oo-
mow-mow" because a classmate used to chant it constantly as he boogied

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through the halls to class. After I married a Bird, I was often reminded that
"everybody knows that the bird is the word." It wasn't until I saw the movie
E.T., the Extraterrestrial that I linked "papa-oo-mow-mow" and "bird is the
word" to the same song. Nor did I know that the song was Surfin' Bird and it
was "papa ooma-mow-mow" until I googled the lyrics for use in this paper.
So far, this has been a 40-year process. Who knows what I have yet to
discover about the word and Surfin' Bird, let alone psychoanalysis,
neuroscience and quantum physics? The important thing is to trust the
process and stay in the hunt!

i
Szent-Gyorgyi, A. (1974). Synthesis, Vol.1, No.1, pp. 12-24. Redwood City, CA:
Psychosynthesis Press.
ii
Sugarman, A. (in press). Mentalization, insightfulness, and therapeutic action: the
importance of mental organization. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, p. 1
iii
Fonagy, P. et.al. (2002). Affect regulation, mentalization and the development of the self.
London: Karnac.
iv
Fonagy, et.al., p. 5
v
Volkan, V. (1988). The need to have enemies and allies. Northvale, N.J.: Aaronson
vi
Volkan, V. (1997). Blood lines: from ethnic pride to ethnic terrorism. Boulder: Westview
Press.
vii
Volkan, V. (2004). Blind Trust: Large groups and their leaders in times of crisis and terror.
Charlottesville, VA: Pitchstone Publishing.
viii
Volkan, V. (2006). Killing in the name of identity: a study of bloody conflicts.
Charlottesville, VA: Pitchstone Publishing.
ix
Volkan, V. (2001). September 11 and societal regression. Mind and Human interaction, 12
(3): 196-216.
x
DeMause, L. (2004). The emotional life of nations. New York: Karnac.
xi
Lakoff, G. (2006). When cognitive science enters politics. Retrieved October 16, 2006 from
http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/research/Lakoff, p. 1

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